If you scare the state enough, the wealth that the richest capitalists have is distributed down, hopefully more of it ending up as real wealth and services for workers. By itself, taxation also can just be shuffling money to different billionaires (see: carbon tax credits and other green capitalism tax schemes)
In the context of the US, it’s good to keep in mind the reason we want billionaires to get taxed more is not because that would give the government more money (the deficit is fictitious, the federal government already prints billions of dollars for military spending, banks create even more money so it’s not even an inflation problem), but purely because taxing billionaires reduces the money and political power they have.
There are other ways of also achieving that same goal.
I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Take three hundred low families of New York and New Jersey, support them, for fifty years, in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel.
Theodore Roosevelt
They’re writing a thesis about treating damage to lungs from smoking. They’re actually really good at this.
Wait, you were raised Catholic and were taught to interpret the Bible literally? That’s weird, and doesn’t match my experience. Did you know one of the scientists who theorized the Big Bang Theory, Georges Lemaitre, was a Catholic priest?
What do you think about non-historical interpretations of the Bible, out of curiosity?
That’s something you can only say if you really stretch the idea of the Gospel. How much of the world only received the Gospel through colonization and enslavement? How much of the world only hears the Gospel today as preached by pastors and priests that are using the Gospel to manipulate the people in their pulpits into handing over cash, if not to be manipulated into even worse things?
Do you really think that a huge number of people that haven’t spent years of their lives devoted to studying theology and Scripture could be said to understand the truth behind it, as opposed to all the ways in which it’s been twisted to serve oppressors?
How many were baptized or otherwise raised in Christian churches that preached nothing but hate and prosperity gospel?
At what point did you turn on CNN and say to yourself…
You’re on a website with a huge percentage of communists and anarchists. What makes you think that the people here use CNN as their moral compass?
Also, what makes you think the users of this website were ever Christian to begin with?
they WANT to be misinformed.
From a recent funny thread:
I usually don’t get bothered by people on the Internet, but holy fucking shit how I was absolutely going crazy over the fact that people unironically shill North Korea.
I’m Korean. We are under constant threat of shit balloons and missiles. They punish people and their family members for trying to leave the country. How can one possibly look at that and say, “Yep, that’s fine”?
Meanwhile the actual, very scary NK apologist rhetoric on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, and Hexbear: the DPRK is just another country and doesn’t deserve to be an outcast and pariah for doing things every country does, like have prisons, a military, and emigration controls.
In the DPRK, they put political dissidents in prison camps.
In the rest of the world, agitators and terrorists are put in prisons that aren’t camps.
One of my software engineering professors referenced the original C&H comic when explaining load testing, then he told us “well the nice thing about load testing software is that you can break it and just rebuild it exactly.” It’s nice we don’t have to do all the linear algebra and other crazy math to know how much load a server can take.
I know it’s kinda weird to use words like “liberate” in this context because it does get pretty close to acting like it’s a good thing that this war is happening, but I’m curious to know, do you think it would be better if Russia didn’t advance in Donetsk?
You sealed him into the dang crystal and he’s gone now. 
steering towards your dogmatic views
He didn’t do anything wrong, though? You’re the one that kept trying to hold China up against the standard of Utopia. You’re the one that called China a “regime” (a meaningless term). You’ve been repeatedly leaving these comments in this thread, acting like you’re gonna leave, but you continue to blather on with your liberal platitudes. If you could write just 1 or 2 substantial comments with good sources for every 5 “Bye!” that you write, maybe the conversation would have come to its natural conclusion by now.
unable to carry it on because the majority of folks is too hypnotised to act.
Where I am, the problem is not that people are too “hypnotised” or propagandized to act. The problem is that every time we have tried to establish our sovereignty the US has violently suppressed us.
Most recently we had a massive protest movement that went absolutely nowhere because it wasn’t organized with anything resembling a coherent leadership; if the various previous attempts at organizing the people hadn’t been destroyed by the US or the colonial government, maybe it could’ve been productive.
Generally, our views on why revolutions haven’t been successful are a lot more nuanced than “people are just too brainwashed.” A lot of us believe that brainwashing itself is not real and it’s just a concept that serves to obscure the real sociological phenomena that prevent class consciousness and revolution.
SCOTUS is democratic because the guy who was president 30 years ago got to make a lifetime appointment of a supreme court justice that makes decisions that affect people who weren’t even alive when they were appointed? You have an extremely low bar for what counts as “democratic.” If your standards are that low, you could even argue that because most people in Iran are Twelver Shia and the Ayatollah is the leader of Twelver Shiism, that’s democracy.
Again, every single state will prosecute destabilizing behavior. Press freedom is gonna be better in wealthy western countries because a few bad news stories don’t destabilize the country the way they do in the developing world. As I pointed out, the way the US reacted to events that actually do have the potential to destabilize the country shows that it is exactly the same as the so-called “authoritarian regimes” and this is also true of liberal European countries.
there is an unelected leader, it’s a theocracy
Women lost the right to abortions in the US very recently because the religious ghouls in the Supreme Court, who are all unelected leaders, decided against it. This is also the reason the US has extremely weak environmental protections, and many other problems that plague US politics.
there’s full control on media, they arrest journalists and whoever opposes to leader, they repress the protests with violence…
Other than full control of media, how does this not describe the US?
Edit: just to pre-empt the obvious counterargument that in the US you can oppose the government without being arrested: yes, you can, as long as you aren’t speaking out in a dangerous way. The 6 Ferguson organizers who all died under mysterious circumstances should be evidence that if you do speak out in a way that the state deems unacceptable, they’ll just kill you. Hopefully you can see how in Iran, not everyone who ever says anything against their government is jailed (we even have Hexbear users from Iran that have posted things that are critical of their government). The thing that would get you jailed is if you destabilize the country with your speech. Every single state in the world will have you jailed for destabilizing it, the only difference is how hard to destabilize each state is.
Of all creatures I’ve met, you are the kindest.